Riccardo Cenedella
MA Material Futures – Central Saint Martins, 2021
As a maker with a sustainable ethos, Riccardo sees design as a tool to create awareness about overconsumption and waste production. He enjoys questioning the meaning of post-consume waste and, through ingenuity, persistence and hands-on experimentation, he is willing to transform it into design artefacts. Riccardo hopes to raise environmental awareness and demonstrate how a wasted material can be transformed into something valuable and usable again.
Riccardo presents his collection Alimenta with MiAL. While working as a waiter during his first year of MA he started to get horrified by the amount of food wasted at the end of every shift. Food is everything that is taken in by humans and used to keep them alive. However, we throw away an average of half a kilo of food per day. This means 89 million tons of food wasted each year in Europe only. By tapping in his ability in making he create an ad hoc material using food waste he daily produced. The food waste, mainly fruit and vegetable peels or leftovers, is blended and dehydrated than is smashed to create a powder. This food powder is then mixed with natural binders and shaped using moulds or sculpted by hands.
Instagram: @cene_____
"There is so much potential in what we call waste, is just a matter of time and experimentation to understand how it can be used. We should create what is yet to come using what is already here."